So Bella reads to her. It's The Wizard of Oz.

She is not terrorized by story violence if she doesn't have to look at it.

And in Oz violence is all ultimately harmless anyway!

At home, too, for one definition. Doesn't help much.

Well, there's no intermediary afterlife management in Oz.

And the wicked witch ultimately melts.

Thank you! That was a fun story.

...don't think either of our Enemies are conveniently vulnerable to water, are they.

Nope.

And she nestles herself in the gap in the roots of an old tree and closes her eyes and sings, again, and flowers spring up on the ground.

There's a local literary trope about it being a sign of innate goodness for flowers to spring up around a person.

In Doriath flowers spring up at everyone's feet when they walk. If you're wondering where someone went you can follow the trail of their flowers. It doesn't happen for the Enemy but I think that's more a choice of aesthetics than flower magic being restricted to good people.

Actually, the fact that he has aesthetics that seem evil by local convention is interesting. It's not conceptually impossible for someone's thing to be "flowers and rainbows and torture".

It might be that our concept of what aesthetics are evil is very shaped by the Enemy. But - Elves like beautiful things, and he deliberately despoils them. Orcs are hideous. He has the corpses of prisoners shackled to the cliff faces around Angband.

That explains your aesthetics; it doesn't explain ours. The aliens present themselves as cute and soft and harmless to draw people in...

Makes sense. If I'd found one at home I'd want to take care of it, though Mum'd guess the truth and Dad'd be paranoid even about cute fluffy things.

How would your mother guess?

She can sense a lot. She could tell that the Noldor'd done something awful as soon as she saw them from a distance, and it wasn't that they were doing anything suspicious in the moment, it was just that Alqualonde and the Doom sat on their souls. And she has some foresight.

Foresight's useful.

Less than you'd think. You don't get foresight about things you can change, it's all things faraway.

...if you don't get it about things you can change it's completely useless, whose idea was that?

I don't think it was anyone's idea! It's just the way foresight works!

But it does mean it wouldn't help very much with the fluffs, would it.

I'm not entirely sure. She didn't get foresight about the fluffs which means there won't be fluffs, but if there were fluffs anyway because of crossover from a different universe, I don't know what that'd do...

Neither do I. Another thing we need to do is have you try reading one.

Right. Next time loop?

Yeah, I'm tempted to squeeze it into this one but if they noticed it'd mean we had to wait another month.